Ethan Hawke stars in this decent Horror film about a true-crime writer in need
of inspiration

I know that film critics are supposed to be movie omnivores, ravenous for cinema in all its infinite variety, but I’ll tell you a secret: left to my own devices, I would probably avoid the majority of horror films.

Some people love being scared witless, which they must think of as a rare treat before settling back into the solid, cheery reassurance of everyday life. Good for them: all I have to do to shred my nerve endings is lie in bed with the lights off, musing on a mysterious little creaking sound.

For those who like to pay for fear, Sinister is very frightening – a little schlocky and unpleasantly voyeuristic, but frightening nonetheless. Ethan Hawke plays Ellison, a true-crime writer whose last truly successful book came out a decade ago, and who is now hitting hard times.

He’s desperate to write another in-depth investigation that seizes the public’s imagination, and so he moves his family into a house where the previous family was murdered by being hung in a line from a tree in the back yard (save for one little girl, Stephanie, who disappeared). Ellison doesn’t tell his wife and two children about the house’s history, a decision to be filed under the heading “first and major bad move.”

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Sinister is what I call a “Get The Hell Out!” film, which is what you want to yell from the moment the family pitches up to a suburban bungalow that boasts the least natural light of any domicile in the US. The sheer murkiness of the house should be warning enough, but soon Ellison has discovered a box of Super 8 home movies in the attic, on each of which the gruesome murder of a different family is recorded (GTHO!).

Ellison watches them one by one, making increasingly tangled notes, trying to crack the evil logic while draining his whisky bottle. And then his son starts having extravagant night terrors (GTHO! Oh, what’s the point? These people never listen).

There are echoes of The Shining, albeit without Stanley Kubrick’s opaque, submerged sense of menace: it’s a cruder kind of string-pulling. But Ellison, like Jack Nicholson’s character Jack Torrance, is an author battling the internal terror of failure, who has dragged his family to a godforsaken place where he proceeds to go to pieces. Hawke – as he gets stubblier and more wild-eyed – even has a faint look of Nicholson about him, with those angular eyebrows jammed above beetling eyes.

There’s one great difference between the film-making of now and 30 years ago, however. Then, directors wanted to suggest everything; now, they want to show us everything. The burlesque art of horror has turned into an in-your-face lap-dance. The home movies in Sinister are essentially snuff films, revealed in detail, right down to the twitching feet of one set of victims as they are strapped on sun-loungers and drowned.

I don’t much want to see snuff films, even fictional ones, and their inclusion here takes the film into grubbier territory than is necessary to spook us. Compare it to that ferociously restrained yet infinitely disturbing scene in The Shining in which the former caretaker, Delbert Grady, speaks fastidiously of how he “corrected” his wife and daughter. Beneath that priggish politeness, blood ran cold.

Still, the director Scott Derrickson has an undeniable talent for the ratcheting up of apprehension, the timing of shocks, and a general atmosphere of deepening mental chaos.

Hawke, too, brings some perspiring credibility to an almost ludicrously blinkered character - and the twists play successfully on the worst worry for susceptible audience members, which is that one day even “Get The Hell Out!” might not be enough.

This article also appeared in SEVEN magazine, free with the Sunday Telegraph.